Current and proposed research includes studies of age differences in short-term memory, visual masking, and more complex cognitive tasks, e.g., digit symbol substitution and sentence verification. We maintain that performance in short-term memory (STM) tasks is best represented by a single store and that a reduction in the capacity of that store is a concomitant of the aging process. These conclusions are based on memory span data and are supported by a model of STM developed in our laboratory. Our proposed work in STM involves extending the length of retention intervals used and broadening the range of tasks to include interference paradigms. In previous work we hypothesized that aging is associated with a reduction in central processing speed and increase in internal noise. We have examined these hypotheses with two types of pattern masks in a backward masking task. As predicted, old subjects required a longer target duration and the magnitude of the age difference interacted with mask. Subsequent studies are proposed to investigate determinants of pattern mask effectiveness and the nature of age-related differences in masking interference. We replicated the pattern of age decline in the digit symbol test and in a subsequent study attempted to assess the contributions of short-term storage aid encodability to the age deficit. However, our manipulation affected both memory and encoding requirements thus preventing separation of these effects. A future study is planned to manipulate memory and encoding demands independently. We administered vocabulary and sentence verification tests to groups of young and old. Elderly subjects scored higher than the young on vocabulary, while the reverse was true in sentence verification. These findings are interesting in light of the fact that vocabulary and sentence verification performance scores were highly correlated for both groups. Future studies are planned to delineate the mechanisms underlying these performance patterns.